Talk:Ponzi!

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Revision as of 09:15, 6 April 2009 by Holly (talk | contribs)


Kevan said:

Seems good; a simple core goal, and plenty of reason for the players to muddy it with desperation and selfishness.

I think you can probably simplify the role of the Hand, though, and just have the moderator standing up periodically to announce the Full Will of the Market - given that players are going to be diversifying a lot anyway, to pre-empt future Hand calls, it won't make much difference to announce a particular colour in advance.

The strong incentive to diversify might be a problem in that, a few rounds in, most players will be able to match any short pattern of beads. I don't know if "three for ten" was a general example, but you might need to bump it up to a pattern of five or seven, or scale down the rewards.

Can the moderator just make it all up in his head, for the Invisible Hand details? I can't see any benefit to it being diligently random, although I may be missing something. (I'm not sure what you mean by the possible need to "create a card set for an exact number of players".) Making it up on the spot would certainly be useful for letting the moderator play it by ear, on the first playtest.

Ben Henley said:

If the available trades were on a deck of cards, the cards could only include colours which are in play, so you'd need different decks for different numbers of players.

If I was moderating this, I might struggle to make up something sensible - I would rather have a random mechanism. Also randomness kind of fits with the theme of the game.

I think maybe drawing marbles from a top hat, then rolling a die/dice for the reward scale?

Kevan said:

Ah, okay, got it. Randomness works, and the props sound good, but I think there's also a lot of thematic flavour to be had from mysterious, omniscient decisions - if the moderator looks thoughtfully around the room before making each call, players will start to develop superstitions about how he's deciding the colours (if he's not asked for any blue tokens, after the first three rounds, then maybe blue tokens are the worthless ones! Sell blue!). Maybe generate them randomly behind a screen, and give the moderator room to fudge them if they feel they need to? (It'd seem a shame to end the game early purely because "10 x red" happened to come up three times in a row for the payout.)

And oh, one idea, from looking at the player numbers - you could scale the game up to take a lot more people by having them form "companies". Instead of one player getting 50 blue beads, five players get 10 blue beads each. Which would have the interesting effect of spreading the "worthless bead" information out a bit - everyone in Greencorp gets told their stock is worthless, so maybe one of them will stand up midgame and blow the whistle on their colleagues, after having offloaded their personal green-bead portfolio. And could be lying.

Kevan said:

Or if you wanted to make sure that the game still worked as well for six as for thirty players, you could total up the score per corporation, at the end, so that each corporation of five people is functionally identical to one human player.

Kevan said:

"Shouting" may be a more practical alternative to the display cylinder, for the bead trade - you're going to have to communicate it to a roomful of players anyway, so might as well stand there shouting it a few times until the offer closes. I suppose you do still need a way to remember what to shout, though.

Guest 566 said:

This game looks fantastic - I hope that we can play it at a Sandpit soon... Hi Ben, I'm not sure we've met, great to read your game. I might reference it in an upcoming talk I'm giving in Liverpool - can you send me some biog details? alex@hideandseekfest.co.uk.

Ben Henley said:

I playtested this on Saturday.

It seemed to work well with 4 players (didn't have spectators doing predictions). I used a top hat and a glove (representing the invisible hand) to pick combinations. Making up the trades based on what players were saying seemed to work fine. It took about 40 minutes to play a game with around 6 rounds of trading, which seemed about long enough.

Holly was the fraudster and also won the game.

Displaying the bead trades was done by just putting the desired combination in a plastic box in the centre of the table - that worked fine.

Lessons learned: might be better to use square beads or Lego blocks instead of round ones, which tend to roll away easily when dropped.

Need to check that bead/block colours can be distinguished by colour blind people.

Holly Gramazio said:

As the fraudster, I felt at quite an advantage in having complete information about which beads were good and which bad - this wasn't so clear at first, when I was worried that I'd get stuck with my worthless beads, but was definitely the case by around halfway through. I don't think this is a problem with the game at all - it felt quite thematically appropriate, certainly...

The need to get more beads, and the way that works, definitely helped to drive trading right to the end of the game, which I wasn't sure would happen. Should also help to get even more reticent players trading quite keenly.